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Fifth presentation – progress update

We presented our progress since last week. We made some adjustments based on the remarks that were given after last week’s presentation, some of these adjustments were already scheduled to happen.

First of all we implemented the fixed position for the search box, this was a remark that was given during the last presentation. Secondly, we added the axes back to the multiples view.

Finally, we incorporated region and world data into our design. The World Bank dataset does not provide data for geographical continents, but features certain regions constructed on their similarity in geographical position, culture and economical conditions. We hence use these regions in our design.

Some interesting remarks were providing after our presentation:

The inclusion of the axes is certainly a positive adjustment. It might also be good to put the x-axis on the same level for each graph and scale each graph the same to be able to compare them to each other more easily. We looked into this possiblity: for series expressed in percentages, this is a possibility we will look into. Nevertheless, for series expressed in absolute numbers, scaling them the same is a problem as visible in Figure 1. We will look into the possibility of expressing these in a logaritmic scale.

problems with global scale for series in absolute numbers

Some remarks were about the graphs themselves: the dots are too small to easily pull up the tooltip, maybe another type of graph could work better, the usage of green and red for positive and negative numbers on the graph, to reduce the numbers shown after the decimal, etc. Increasing the size of the dots is not an option, the line graph will become too distorted and the goal of the visualization is not to see the exact number but the trend. Incorporating green/red for positive/negative values is not a good add-on in our eyes. First of, we use colors to diversify in country/region/world data, this would then no longer be possible. Secondly, it is already very easy to see which values are positive/negative at first glance by their position according to the x-axis which represents the zero value.

a valuable remark was made that some graphs or series had almost no data and that we should explore the possibility of dropping these. We will indeed investigate this.

One final remark was that for some series it is not very clear from their title what they actually entail. The suggestion was made to include a pop-up with further information about them. This information is available in the World Bank database and we will indeed look into adding this feature.